


maybe sprout wings

by lastwingedthing



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, F/F, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 10:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7754413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastwingedthing/pseuds/lastwingedthing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanessa, her daemon, and their demon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	maybe sprout wings

**Author's Note:**

> Season 1 canon only. I wrote this back in 2014 for a kink meme prompt, but never quite managed to clean it up for posting until now. My timing could be better...
> 
> RIP, show. RIP, Vanessa! :(

As children, it was always Vanessa and Pelagis who would go further and faster than anyone else. Pelagis would become a quickfingered monkey, a tall horse racing down the sand, a dolphin against the beating waves, and Vanessa was always beside her.

Sometimes Pelagis became a gull or a hawk or an eagle, soaring. She'd fly far higher than the others dared, heartstoppingly high, until Vanessa was crying and calling out to her against the wrenching pain in their belly and she tumbled down again into Vanessa's arms again, a small furred thing, safe.

Chalcoparion was never far behind her, bold and brave where Mina was all shy caution; but Vanessa and Pelagis were of the same mind always, a matched pair, fearless. 

Aste was a gentler soul. When Peter joined the girls to play, Peter always begged his daemon to become something bold and fierce and wild to match the others, and mostly she would change herself to please him: a tiger, an elephant, a sharp-finned shark. When Sir Malcolm was away, even a lioness, sometimes; but no matter how Peter begged she would never change herself that way when Sikanda was home to see. 

 

After they settled, only Chalcoparion kept his wings. He was the first, finding himself a wild goose one lazy afternoon, grey-feathered and sturdy. Pelagis and Aste called and called for him to join them past the breakers where they were salmon, playing a quick diving game, but he would not; he said he liked this shape too well to change. He kept the goose-shape all day, no matter how the others teased him; and coming home in the twilight Mina called him beautiful, watching the quick strong spread of his wings as he flew. 

He never changed again.

And by the time Sir Malcolm returned, many months later, his son's daemon had settled too. Aste was a roe deer, as delicate and fragile in her form as in her nature. As in his son's nature, the part of Peter that Sir Malcolm always refused to see.

It was not as if a great change came over him. Sir Malcolm had always been indifferent towards his son. It was only a little scrap of hope he lost - hope that his son's daemon might show herself to be wild and bold and dangerous, a worthy heir to the knight with the lion-soul - but by this time that hope must have been very small indeed. Sir Malcolm did know his son, even as he scorned him.

For Mina and Vanessa, the days after Sir Malcolm came home were like a holiday no matter what the season. But all through that first bright laughing evening Vanessa fancied she could see it: an immense weighted net cast over Peter and Aste, invisible to all others and making them in turn invisible to Sir Malcolm's eyes. Peter tried scheme after chattering scheme to catch his father's attention, while Aste crept in corners and hid from his sight. Sir Malcolm did not see them.

Only Sikanda cast her scornful eyes their way, sometimes, piercing through that indifferent veil.

Instead it was Mina who caught her father's eye; bright beautiful Mina, laughing, as Chalcoparion preened and showed off the grey expanse of his wings.

"Beautiful," Sir Malcolm murmured, his eyes wandering for a moment to Mrs Ives, seated across the table.

Chalcoparion stretched out his neck in pride, with the absurd self-assured confidence of the settled.

Vanessa shivered, watching him - in jealousy? In longing? This hunger in her was so new.

 

Vanessa and Pelagis saw Sir Malcolm in the maze that night. Saw Sir Malcolm, and Mrs Ives.

Sikanda and Melanthios were in the grass beside them, and they were together in a way Vanessa and Pelagis had never seen before, wrestling and rolling together as children's daemons did. Melanthios looked so small beside the bulk of the lioness, his tabby fur almost invisible in the darkness, but Vanessa could hear his rumbling purr louder even than the cries of the adults. 

They were so quiet as they watched, so still. Pelagis was a bat beside Vanessa, both of them almost invisible in the growing dark. They saw, they saw it - the way Sir Malcolm moved in her, the way Sikanda moved, they saw -

Sikanda looked up, then. Her eyes flashed. Vanessa felt as if she could see herself in those eyes. See herself watching, as she and Pelagis ran.

 

Vanessa dreamed that night. Dreamed of the maze, and her mother.

She dreamed she did not run.

Instead she knelt in the grass beside Sikanda. She ran her hands through that coarse fur, felt the bunching muscles of her, the coiled hidden strength. She dreamed she wrestled with the lioness on the dew-wet ground, with the velvety weight of those massive paws on her shoulders. A fiery streak like electricity ran down her spine, her whole body liquid with pleasure. She felt wicked and hot - oh, to touch another's daemon - to put her hands on her -

Sikanda growled so deep and low Vanessa could feel it in her bones. A hot and hungry sound, and Vanessa was trembling with it, the sound filling her up and setting some deep part of her to echoing -

She woke, after a time. Pelagis woke with her, coiling around her, no longer the soft-furred terrier she had been when they slept. She was a serpent now, her blunt sleek head nudging close into the warmth beneath Vanessa's chin.

In the daylight Vanessa found her to be olive-brown and slender, her scales soft as silk against Vanessa's skin. She could move faster than Vanessa believed possible, quick and clever and curious; but as they grew older together, she spent more and more of her time wrapped around Vanessa's body, pressed against her bare skin for the warmth of it, the sliding silken pleasure. She was more than nine feet long by the time they were twenty, though she stayed slender, and so light that her weight never harmed even Chalcoparion when they were together.

Her fangs were long and venomous. The inside of her mouth was black.

 

_Stay with us_ , Pelagis begged them at the ending of things, on that last sweet desperate night before the world changed. She begged them both, Chalcoparion and Mina, with all the words Vanessa had never had the courage to say to the friend of her heart, her soul, her truest dearest friend. _Why do you have to leave us, with_ him _? Why won't you stay?_

Neither answered. But they let Vanessa and Pelagis curl up with them to sleep anyway, crowded together in the same bed as they had done so many times before.

No more, after tonight - no more -

Mina slept, after a time, but Vanessa stayed awake.

_I love you_ , she said silently, to the silent dark. _I love you. I love you._

They were the only words, words she had said to Mina so many times before - but they were the wrong words, too. Vanessa did not know what the right words would be, the words that could tell Mina all the things her heart was crying. _I love you as I love life itself_ , she would say _. I do not want a husband. I do not want you to leave me. How can you want to leave me?_

_How can you not love me as I love you?_

_I want to be with you for every day of my life._

_How is it that you do not love me?_

It was a fierce dark ache in her, a longing in her something like the pull she'd felt as a child when Pelagis, playing, flew out to the very limits of their range. As if her heart was being slowly, steadily torn in two, and she could feel every sinew of it breaking, every vessel snapping free. She could not bear the pain of it, she could not bear it - _Mina_ -

In the moments before she rose and left their bed for the last time, as she kissed Mina goodbye, she felt it: felt her daemon coil around Mina, her silken scales against human flesh.

For a moment Pelagis held her tight, so tight, and they would never let her go, she was _theirs_ and they loved her and they would never let her go. The thrill of that forbidden touch made them both tremble. Oh, they _wanted_ -

Mina shifted then, in her sleep. Chalcoparion stirred beside her. In a moment they would wake - they would cry out in horror and disgust -

Rage swept over Pelagis and Vanessa then, rage like they had never felt before.

Together they let Mina go. Together they went down into the night.  

 

Afterwards, as Sir Malcolm closed the gate to bar their way, he said to them, _I should have known. From the moment she settled, I should have known what you were. You are a serpent, with a serpent's heart. A serpent soul._ He looked at Vanessa, and his eyes were cold. _No one has ever told you what your daemon is, have they? Her true name? She's a mamba, an African monster. I've seen men dead in half an hour from the bite of a snake like you. I should have known._

He walked away as if he could not bear to even look at them. He was quiet, but Sikanda snarled as she left them, a deep low sound that made the hair stand up on Vanessa's neck.

Mina was not there. Chalcoparion was not there.

Vanessa and Pelagis clung to each other tight, hearts breaking, as the world ended in a rushing black tide.

 

In the first days of the madness Vanessa was quiet sometimes, and calm. Calm enough to fool her parents. Calm enough to fool even Pelagis.

It was a simple enough thing for her - for the thing that was inside Vanessa, and was not Vanessa - to slip out from Pelagis' sure embrace. Whatever it was that was in her mind moved with smooth, assured purpose, its intentions hidden deep, where even Pelagis could not see.

The thing that was not Vanessa slipped outside the bedroom door before Pelagis could follow, and locked the door behind it.

 

It heard the screaming, but it was not Vanessa. It was a demon moving through the black night. The body it was in felt fear, pain, heartbreak; the body it was in was still, in some part, trapped inside the form of a snake, unable to pass through the locked door to the other half of herself. Not being Vanessa, the pain and fear had no true effect on it, though the sensations made the body shake and tremble, and sometimes fall. It was agony, but in its time the demon had been tortured, drowned, burned alive; every torture imaginable, and this pain was not the greatest it had felt. It was worth it, to be free.

The demon _was_ free. It felt nothing; but then even nothingness was a kind of peace. A moment of quiet, and rest, to set against ten thousand years of rage and pain.  

The demon walked through the empty night, below the moon's face, into a wind from the sea.

But then she was Vanessa again and she was stumbling, falling, weeping in pain and fear and heartbreak. Running into the night, running back to the house she had left - the room she had left -

Pelagis was there, on the other side of the door, curled into a tight inward knot of herself. Vanessa wept, clinging to her, cursing her madness and her fate; Pelagis uncoiled, but did not respond to her, or speak.

_Fool_ , the demon said to the daemon, with Vanessa's mouth. _Why do you scorn me? I have given you a gift: I have made you a witch-daemon, with the power to separate soul and body entire. You ought to worship me in thanks for setting you free._

Pelagis looked into her soul's eyes and saw them pale and flat and empty, like the moon. Vanessa - the thing that was inside Vanessa - was smiling.

Pelagis had never known hate like this before, though she would know it again so many times in their years of madness.

The thing she hated looked like herself.


End file.
